PolicyMap » Library Site License

New on PolicyMap: Health Data and USDA Food Desert Locator

Phil Vu — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:24:21 +0000

June 2011 Updates


June 2011
New on PolicyMap: Health Data and USDA Food Desert Locator
More Data on PolicyMap! PolicyMap – a simple application rich with data and geographic decision making tools – makes you smarter.And now, you’ve got even more data to work with. NEW Data! Health: In addition to data previously available such as Medically Underserved Areas (MUAs), uninsured populations, and hospital and nursing home locations, we have added several new datasets to our Health tab including: Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) Nurse-practitioner led clinics Retail-based health clinics This data, in combination, is powerful. The Department of Health and Human Services’ held its second annual Health Data Initiative (HDI) Forum earlier this month and invited PolicyMap to present during an interactive apps demonstration to show how PolicyMap could be used to explore how retail-clinics could expand health-care to the underserved. Check out the widget built for this presentation and embed it on your own website for free! USDA’s Food Desert and Food Atlas Data:USDA’s designation of “food desert” census tracts is now available on PolicyMap. For those of you doing applications to the CDFI Fund, you can explore these areas – in combination with other demographic data – on PolicyMap and make high quality printed maps for your application. You’ll find TRF’s own analysis of block groups with low-access to supermarkets on PolicyMap as well. Learn more Percentage of people with low access to a supermarket or large grocery store as of 2006
UPDATED Data!
Home Sales: Home sale data for 2010 Q3 is now available on PolicyMap as are improved data for all years and quarters. This update allows you to track how home sale prices and home sale volume has changed at the block group, census tract, zip code, city, county and state levels since 2006. 2010 annual statistics will be available shortly. Census 2010: Population, race, educational attainment and residential vacancy are just a few of the indicators now available on PolicyMap. The Census will release more information from the 2010 survey (Summary File 1 (SF1)) late this summer. These SF1 indicators will include sex and age, types of households and housing vacancy types, to name a few. Once released, you’ll find them in PolicyMap. More from ACS: You can now get age, sex and ethnicity ACS estimates in the Demographics tab and in our reports. Coming next month: ACS estimates for family incomes and income categories, as well as poverty data.
Customer Spotlight: New University Subscribers
PolicyMap’s use by University libraries across the country continues to grow and this month we welcome the libraries at Syracuse, Tufts and Rutgers universities. Students and professors within these library systems now have full access to PolicyMap for their research and university-related studies. Learn more about our University library licenses. What's New As always, we are committed to keeping the datasets available on PolicyMap up-to-date. This month, you’ll find the latest monthly unemployment and building permit data from the BLS, bank failure locations from the FDIC, and updated hospitals and nursing homes listings. Newest Feature: You can now “search” for address-level properties. Find the exact property you are interested in using the new radio search button in our Add Sites menu. Learn more. Coming Soon! Look for the following data to be released to PolicyMap in the coming weeks: Area Median Incomes (AMI) data for FY2011 CDC Death Statistics Farmers market locations Year end 2010 Home Sale statistics To stay abreast of all our updates, check out our blog or follow us on Facebook! Or, register to make sure you receive our monthly email updates. The PolicyMap Team

August Updates 2010

Phil Vu — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:23:39 +0000

All the data you need. All in one place. All online. | August 2010

PolicyMap student pricing

It’s back-to-school time, and students can once again access all the data and all the tools at PolicyMap for just a fraction of the cost of a textbook. At $35 a semester, this is a great tool for majors in business, law, urban studies, geography, economics, sociology, political science, or any other field where geographic information mapping is used. PolicyMap is much easier to use than professional GIS software, plus all the data is already here. For more information, click here.

Also for students: PolicyMap offers site licenses for university libraries. This way, any student at a given school can access PolicyMap for free through their online library system. The University of Pennsylvania and the American University Law School are among the growing number of libraries that are adding PolicyMap to their online offerings. If you want PolicyMap at your school, contact your librarian and ask them to set up a trial with us. Visit our blog more information.

Improved feature: Embed maps!

You’ve always been able to place images of our maps on your website with the embed map feature. But now you can embed an interactive map into your website, blog, or message board that has the capacity to pan and zoom, to better show what’s happening in your community. Let’s say you’ve created a great map of median incomes in Minneapolis, but a visitor to your site wants to see the incomes in St. Paul. Now they can zoom and scroll to their hearts’ content.

See some examples of the embed map on our blog:

As Always, New and Updated Data

This month, we’ve greatly expanded our Picture of Subsidized Households data from HUD, with information ranging from Section 8 rents to seniors with housing subsidies, to subsidized households by race and ethnicity. You can find all this and more data on subsidized housing in the Owners and Renters tab. Also new on PolicyMap this month is CRA eligibility data, available in the Money and Income tab.

PolicyMap always has the latest data as it becomes available. This month’s data updates include: Supplemental Security Income (SSI), homelessness, building permits, unemployment, Chicago home foreclosures (subscribers only), bankruptcy, Area Median Income, and obesity rates.

Become a Subscriber today! Subscribers gain access to all datasets and unique custom features. With a PolicyMap subscription; you can access current year estimates or 5-year projections for US Census data, home sale data at a blockgroup or census tract level, draw right on top of the map with Build Custom Region, generate custom reports for any location in the country, or overlay 3 data layers to analyze data. You can learn more about PolicyMap subscriptions here. Contact us for a free demo or get a free trial: pmap@policymap.com.

www.policymap.com

ALA Annual Conference iPad Winner!

Phil Vu — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:12:50 +0000

Congratulations to Christopher Whiteman from the American University Library for winning the PolicyMap iPad drawing at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference in Washington DC.

We would like to thank everyone for stopping by our booth and learning more about PolicyMap. We hope to see everyone at the upcoming American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference in San Diego. PolicyMap is a great resource for students and faculty containing over 15,000 indications of data ranging from demographics, home sales, education, mortgage origination, and much more. Visit our main page www.policymap.com for more information or send us an email at pmap@policymap.com.

Universities or schools interested in our IP-based Library License, please contact at info@policymap.com for a price quote and even a full trial for the entire campus.

July 2010 Updates

Phil Vu — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:24:49 +0000

All the data you need. All in one place. All online. | July 2010

You asked. We listened.

Better print resolution and aerial imagery for your maps are here. And you can find them both for FREE in PolicyMap. As a registered user or subscriber, just login and check them out.

Higher Resolution Maps: You‘ve had the ability to print maps as both JPEGs and PDFs and incorporate them in your own work. Now, make your work even more sophisticated by creating high resolution maps. Just select the PNG file option when you click “print”. Check them out, and let us know what you think!

Aerial Imagery from Google Maps: Using Google’s public API, we’re bringing you Google aerial imagery in PolicyMap. Map your area of interest, then click “aerial” in the bar below the map. You’ll get side-by-side maps. PolicyMap on the left; Google aerials on the right. Pan, zoom in or zoom out, and the maps stay in sync. Create custom regions in PolicyMap and see them on the aerial view. Cool stuff.

Subscriber Highlight! IFF – a CDFI based in Chicago – was one of our earliest clients here at PolicyMap, and they are now one of the first to roll out a series of “widgets” on their website. They regularly upload information about where they make investments across the Midwest as a way of better understanding the neighborhoods in which they invest – and how those markets are changing. Through PolicyMap, they can check out the demographics, incomes, school test scores, unemployment and more in the areas they care about. Now, these widgets – interactive maps powered by PolicyMap – allow IFF’s website visitors to do the same. See what IFF is doing in Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.

Updated Home Sale Data! Subscribers can now look to PolicyMap for year-end home sale statistics for neighborhoods across the nation. These home sale statistics are aggregated from actual sales data and can give you information down to the block group. With home sale statistics available on annual basis from 2000 through 2009, you can see how very discreet areas are doing. Read about the latest quarterly update and we will have more in the coming weeks, so visit our blog for updates.

Take the PolicyMap Survey! We know everyone is inundated with surveys now, but this one is truly special. First, it will help us continually improve our product for you and second, you just might win a very cool TRF cap or water bottle. Be one of the first 50 people to respond to the survey here and we’ll mail one of these great gifts! Click Here

As always, check our blog for the latest goings on. We recently attended the American Library Association Conference in DC and are following up with a number of libraries interested in setting up subscriptions for their universities. If you are interested as well, just let us know and we will call you

May 2010 Updates on PolicyMap

Phil Vu — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:17:20 +0000

All the data you need. All in one place. All online. | MAy 2010

PolicyMap: More data, more tools… faster than ever. If you haven’t started working with PolicyMap, now is the time. You’ll find new, varied data like election results, small business lending and religious affiliations; more essential tools like the ability to create time-series maps, an easier geographic search function and a widget that allows you to brings maps, tables and downloading to your own website. The underlying PolicyMap platform is more streamlined and efficient than ever, bringing you faster loading maps, tables, reports and analytics.

MORE FREE DATA…….

Election Results and Turnout Rates for Presidential and Congressional Races in 2004 and 2008: Check out election results and turnout information for the 2004 and 2008 races for President, Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. The “margin of victory” maps provide a handy guide to who won a given county, and by how much. This data comes from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.

This data is available for free under the Demographics tab in the Add Data Layer Menu “Elections.”

Religious Affiliation: Use this county level data to see where the highest rates of religious adherents live and which denominations are most prevalent in counties across the nation. This data, from the Glenmary Research Center, was collected by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) and includes statistics for 149 religious groups.

This data is available for free under the Demographics tab in the Add Date Layer Menu under “Religions.”.

CRA Small Business Lending: Use this data to see how many small business loans were made in counties across the nation, average amounts and the percent of loans made by the largest small business lenders. Multiple years are available so you can see how lending by some of these leading lenders has changed.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate. TRF extracted data regarding small business lending activity from the Peer Small Business Data and constructed categories for viewing this data that it hopes are useful to policymakers and descriptive of neighborhoods and markets.

This data is available for free under the Lending Activity tab in the Add Data Layer menu. Look under the Small Business Loans and Small Farm Loans categories.

UPDATED! Building Permits: Annual and monthly building permit data is available dating back to 2000 and updated monthly. From the U.S. Census Bureau’s Residential Construction Branch Data, we include the number of buildings and units for which building permits were issued, total dollar value and change over time. Data is available for counties and MSAs around the nation. This data is free under the Real Estate Conditions tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

MORE TOOLS……Time Series Maps: Make your own custom ranges for an indicator and have them apply to all time periods so you can easily create a series of maps showing how an indicator has changed over time. This feature is available to subscribers. See how it works.

Auto-generated Search: Start typing in a geography in the Search bar and you’ll automatically be given some options from which to select. It’s particularly helpful if you are searching for a city name that exists in multiple states or if a city has the same name as its county.

More Robust Widgets: The widget, which allows you to bring interactive mapping to your own website, lets you give your users interactive maps, ranked tables, along with the ability to download and print. To get a sense of how this works, check out our new Health Widget which includes a variety of indicators from HHS, Census and USDA. All you need to do is embed the iframe code in your web page. It can’t get any easier (copy and paste) or cheaper (free). Find the code to embed here. Easily customize the code to change the colors or adjust in any of many ways. Read our blog posting to learn how or contact us to create your own widget.

Library Licenses: Know of a library that would be interested in a PolicyMap subscription for its students and professors? Just have them contact us.

Coming Soon! Aerials – You’ll soon be able to combine the power of data and aerial photography of the neighborhoods in which you work.

www.policymap.com

PolicyMap.com Site Licenses Available for University Libraries

Maggie McCullough — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:01:23 +0000

PolicyMap.com Site Licenses Available for University Libraries

Policymap.com is an online data and mapping application currently used by students within your college or university. Students wanting to access all of the data and functionality available in PolicyMap have, to date, purchased individual subscriptions on their own through our website.

We are pleased to announce that we now offer site licenses for university libraries enabling students to access PolicyMap through their library system. We welcome the opportunity to set your library up with a trial so you can evaluate the product. Pricing is very competitive and is based on FTE within your university. PolicyMap is a fully hosted, cloud-based product so there is nothing to install, download or maintain on your end. Authorized visitors to your library will be able to access everything in PolicyMap simply by coming to your library.

The first libraries to subscribe include the University of Pennsylvania and American University Law School.

To set up a trial or obtain a price quote for your university library, just contact us. You can read more about all that we have to offer by visiting our website at http://www.policymap.com/customers-universities.html.

The PolicyMap Team

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April 2010 Updates

Phil Vu — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:11:04 +0000

New for March on PolicyMap! Look for the following new and updated datasets on PolicyMap!

NEW! Foreclosure Filings for Chicago Metro Area: As a part of our Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) work with Mercy Portfolio Services and the City of Chicago, we license foreclosure filing and auction data on a monthly basis from Record Information Services (RIS). The data is cleaned and processed by the Woodstock Institute, then loaded into PolicyMap for viewing in interactive maps. The data gives Mercy and the City of Chicago an abundance of information about foreclosure filings and auctions taking place in Chicago and Kane County each month. While we are not allowed to make the data available to the public for free, we have been given permission by RIS to share this data with PolicyMap subscribers. If you’d like to consider becoming a subscriber, but want to take a look at this data first, just sign up for our 7-day free trial. If you already have an account and would like to try a 7-day trial, please send your request to info@policymap.com.

Click here to interact with map.

You’ll find this data under the Local Foreclosures tab in the Add Sites menu.

This type of data is invaluable to NSP grantees nationwide as they consider where to acquire properties for their program or simply stay on top of an ever-changing housing market. If you are an NSP grantee and have foreclosure or other data you’d like us to similarly load for you, please contact us.

FBI Crime Data for 2008: The latest data released by the FBI has been added to PolicyMap, so you can see crime rates for cities and counties across the nation for 2005 through 2008. Data includes counts and rates of aggravated assaults, burglary, motor vehicle thefts, murder, rape and robbery for cities and counties across the nation. Coverage gets better each year, so check it out. This data is available for free under the Neighborhood Conditions tab.

New Demographic Indicators: PolicyMap subscribers can now access two additional indicators from Claritas, Inc: Population Density and Sex. These indicators can provide you with information about the density of an area’s population and its male/female composition.

Click here to interact with map.

You can find these under the Demographics tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

UPDATED! Home Sale Statistics: Home sale statistics from 2001 through Q3 2009 are now available for neighborhoods across the nation from PolicyMap. This data, supplied by Boxwood Means, Inc., is available to subscribers under the Real Estate Data tab. Create thematic maps, trend charts or generate reports analyzing home sale activity over time in the communities you care about.

UPDATED! Building Permits: Annual and monthly building permit data is available dating back to 2000 and updated monthly. This data, from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Residential Construction Branch Data, includes both the number of buildings and units for which building permits were issued, their total dollar value and change over time. Data is available for counties and MSAs around the nation.

Click here to interact with map.

You’ll find this data for free in PolicyMap under the Real Estate Conditions tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

Premium Subscriber Data: Remember to check out the datasets available under Premium Subscriber data. As organizations subscribe to PolicyMap and send us their data for upload, some choose to make their data available to the public. You can click on anything under Premium Subscriber Data in the Add Sites menu to see what is available. When you add a set of points, remember that you have the ability to click on a point to see underlying information and filter to see a subset of points. Have questions? Just call us at (866) 923-6277 or send us an email.

UPDATED! Monthly Unemployment from the BLS: Check out the latest December 2009 and January 2010 employment, unemployment, and labor force data for states, counties, metropolitan areas, and many cities, by place of residence. This data is updated monthly on PolicyMap and is available back through the year 2000 under the Jobs and Economy tab. To add a fully interactive map of unemployment across the country, check out our free PolicyMap widget.

NEWS

More free widgets! You can now embed interactive maps of health data into your own website using our free widget. Descriptions of the data available and links to the code for you to embed can be found here. Remember, our widget – the iframe code that allows you to quickly and easily embed interactive maps on your own website – can be customized on your end. You can change the color of the map, change a boundary name and much more. Read our blog posting to learn how.

The beautiful part about these widgets is that as soon as new data is available, PolicyMap updates it for www.policymap.com and the new data is automatically updated in your widget.

Library Licenses: Know of a library that would be interested in a PolicyMap subscription for its students and professors? Just have them contact us.

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March 2010 Updates

Phil Vu — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:16:03 +0000

New for March on PolicyMap! New tools and datasets are now available! Whether you are a city official managing a housing or foreclosure program, a student conducting research for course work, a community lender looking to better understand your portfolio in this market, or a foundation making decisions with limited resources, these new tools and data allow you to visualize and incorporate market information into your work in simpler, more efficient ways.

New Ways to Create and Use Custom Regions: PolicyMap subscribers have always had the ability to draw custom areas on a map – on the fly – as a means of generating a picture of life in the area through maps, tables and reports. Quickly find out, for example, how many people live in an area, what types of jobs they have, the vacancy rate, or what the housing stock looks like. Now, you can create these regions in two new powerful ways:

Assemble a Region: You can select and save a specific set of geographies, like block groups, census tracts or counties to create a custom region. The geographies can be next to each other to create a specific neighborhood – or across town if your region is not contiguous.
Create a Radius Region: You can create a radius region by either typing in an address or clicking on the map to specify the center, select the size of the radius and save the radius for future work.

Also new is the ability to layer more than one custom region onto your map!

Go to our custom region tutorial to learn more about how to use these new custom region features or contact our help desk at any time.

Generate Lists of Properties that fall in Your Target Areas: The Analytics tool allows subscribers to find places on a map that meet up to 3 criteria. For some cities dealing with foreclosure issues, this means looking for areas where foreclosure risk is high, but neighborhoods are stable when it comes to schools, vacancy or other neighborhood conditions. Now, by overlaying point level properties on the map, users can generate a list of only those properties which fall into targeted areas. You could load in points like sheriff sales or foreclosure filings and then generate a list of only those that fall in your target areas. To learn more about how this works, sign up for one of our online demos or give us a call.

NEW! Building Permits: Annual and monthly building permit data is now available dating back to 2000. This data, from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Residential Construction Branch Data, includes both the number of buildings and units for which building permits were issued, total dollar value and change over time. Data is available for counties and MSAs nationwide. PolicyMap updates this data every month.

You can see this data for free under the Real Estate Conditions tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

NEW! Cars and How People Get to Work: Data on how people get to work, how long it takes them to get there and how many cars the average household owns is now available. Data from 2000 comes from the Census and is available to the public. Current year estimates and 5-year projections are available to subscribers from Claritas, Inc. You can see this data at a national level, but more importantly you can drill down into the neighborhoods you care about to see information at a block group or census tract level.

Click here to interact with map.

Find this data in the Commute to Work section under the Neighborhood Conditions tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

NEW! Obesity, Diabetes, and Food Related Assistance: You’ll find some of the health statistics recently made available by the USDA through its Food Environment Atlas, mapped and available in tables on PolicyMap. This data includes statistics on obesity, diabetes and the availability of assistance under the SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) or WIC programs.

Click here to interact with map.

You can find this data for free under the Health tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

UPDATED! Monthly Unemployment from the BLS: Check out the latest November and December 2009 employment, unemployment, and labor force data for states, counties, metropolitan areas, and many cities, by place of residence. This data is updated monthly on PolicyMap and is available as far back as 2000.

Find this data for free under the Jobs & Economy tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

NEWS The Widget: Did you know that our widget – the iframe code that allows you to quickly and easily embed interactive maps on your own website – can be customized on your end? You can change the color of the map; change a boundary name and much more. Read our blog posting to learn how.

To see some widgets in action on other pages, check these out:
Adecco Group
Stats Indiana

The beautiful part about these widgets is that as soon as new data is available, PolicyMap updates it for www.policymap.com and the new data is automatically updated in your widget. Learn more.

Library Licenses: The University of Pennsylvania Library is now a subscriber to PolicyMap. This means that if you are an authorized user of the library system, you now have unlimited access to PolicyMap for your school and research work. If you know of a library that might be interested, have them contact us.

Policy Map, a recent addition to the Penn Library website.

Phil Vu — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:55:50 +0000

Policy Map, a recent addition to the Penn Library website, is a great resource to go to for up to date demographic data. Just tap in a city or zip code and you have access to thousands of indicators related to demographics, crime, money and income, real estate, education, energy, and health. In addition to zip code and city, you can search by census tract, state, county, school districts, and legislative or Congressional districts. Policy Map generates its data in the form of maps, data tables and reports which can be easily exported as jpegs or pdfs. The number of indicators is noteworthy. You can get demographic breakdowns for ethnicity, religion, voting, etc. from a lot of sources but Policy Map offers many additional profile handles as illustrated by a search I did comparing obesity figures in Philadelphia in 2008 versus 2006.

Click here to read this article by Sharon Black on the Annenberg Library blog on February 22, 2010.

The University of Pennsylvania Library now has a subscription to PolicyMap!

Maggie McCullough — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:50:38 +0000

If you are a current student, faculty member or staff of the University with the credentials to access the Library’s licensed electronic resources, you can now access PolicyMap through the Library’s system. Accessing the site through the library gives you automatic access to all of the data and functionality available through PolicyMap. Create maps and tables, generate reports and conduct analysis that you can pull directly into your University work. Your use of the site through the library is governed by Terms of Use that can be found on the main PolicyMap page within the library system or you can read them here.

If you would like more information about licenses available to libraries, just give us a call or send an email at info@policymap.com or 866-923-MAPS.

The PolicyMap Team